Page - 37 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Arnd Schneider | An anthropology of sea voyage 37 II Both Bronislaw Malinowski and claude Lévi-Strauss are examples of the single anthropologist as ‘hero’ (the term Susan Sontag famously applied to Lévi-Strauss, Sontag 1963), travelling as it were at certain moments of high modernity which collapsed arguably in the 1980s (cf. Jordheim 2014), preceded only by a decade by the final suspension of passenger services to South America. Malinowski’s, and later Lévi-Strauss’s, sea travels, as those of other early and mid-20th cen- tury anthropologists, also take place during periods of unprecedented migrations of Europeans across the Atlantic in particular, part of the age of mass migration. These resumed briefly in the inter-war period, with smaller contingents of refugees fleeing fascist, francoist and Nazi persecution into the first years of WWII (Lévi-Strauss being one of them), and a last period of migrations after WWII till the early 1950s (mostly of economic migrants, but also consisting of smaller contingents of those wanting to escape prosecution for their Nazi or fascist past),5 with passenger services coming to an end in the 1970s. One of the main countries of immigration was Argentina. Yet European sea travel itself, indeed the study of immigrants, would have been far removed from the anthropology of the time. 6 Sea travel of Europeans for the purpose of emigration or research was of course taken for granted by early and mid-20th century anthropologists, but not considered a subject of study – that, obviously, lay elsewhere in an exotic location in the tropics, not among one’s own on board of an ocean liner. however, the perceptiveness and sensibility applied by anthropologists in both their descrip- tions and reflections of their own sea voyages and, when the sea became a subject of research, might be a useful foil for the understanding of immigrant accounts of sea travels. Indeed such a heuristic procedure might be apposite both for the historic times of mass migration (which still remains a much under-researched field in anthropology) and for the more recent past and present, with massive maritime movement of refugees and immigrants, for instance from South East Asia (e. g. the ‘boat people’ fleeing after the Vietnam war) or across the Mediterranean to Europe (e. g. Pinelli 2015) Argentina – though it was not on the orbit of either Malinowski’s antipodean, and later transatlantic travels, nor of those by Lévi-Strauss (to Brazil in 1935; and to the United States in 1941), is an interesting case among immigrant societies, and the multiple cases of sea travel this involved. Argentina is second only to the United States in terms of absolute numbers of immigrants received during times of mass migration, and ranks first by number of immigrants in relation to its original population before 1870. Among the classic immigration countries (including the US, canada and Australia) it is perhaps unique in that it took a different path to economic development then what was forecast still in the 1920s, when it was ranked 8th among the world economic powers. 7 In this context it useful to look at some immigrant accounts of sea travel. It is here that I turn to some of my own material on Italian immigrants in Argentina (taken from Schneider, 5 for the Argentine context, see Schneider (1995, 1999), and the further literature contained therein. 6 With some notable exceptions in the US, e. g. franz Boas (1912) and Paul Radin (1935). Only much later Malinowski’s student Raymond firth would turn to study Italians in London (Garigue and firth 1956). 7 for the historical and socioeconomic background, see Schneider (2000) and the further literature contained therein.